Run a marathon, drink less, volunteer more — we all know the classic new year’s resolutions. But they rarely include cultural habits bar the vague “read more”. Our writers have been thinking about what exactly they plan to take on or give up in the realms of literature, music and film, the more specific, the better. What is your cultural resolution for 2026? Let us know in the comments.
Embrace my Beatlemania
I am going to read more Mark Lewisohn on the Beatles. You’ll have to bear with me as I explain why this requires resolve. When Tune In was published as the first volume of his multi-volume history, I read it to review it for this paper. I thought it magnificent. But then his publisher issued an extended edition approximately twice as long. It seemed inconceivable that anything could be twice as long as Tune In and still be relevant. But then I started on the first half and it altered my thinking not simply about the Beatles but about the whole of postwar culture and politics. So now I’m going to finish it. I am going to overcome the feeling that I already know too much about the Beatles and that it’s an indulgence.
Fraser Nelson, columnist 
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky, painted in 1872 by the Russian artist Vasily Perov
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Get back into Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky was the first “serious” author I read and it all clicked for me. I did the whole set. But I was wrong to think I’d ticked that D-box and should move on. Reading The Idiot now is like a whole new book — with meaning, humour and insight that no teenager could have properly understood. I’m going to reread his books next year and, in between, pulp fiction. Hits like The List and Yellowface nailed the cultural trends of their time. Fiction gets to the truth far better than non-fiction, on which I’ve wasted perhaps too much time.
Susie Goldsbrough, critic 
James Cagney and Barbara Payton in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)
ALAMY
Watch more film noir
I recently came across a fantastic short essay by Paul Schrader (the fella who wrote Taxi Driver) on film noir, a term coined by 1940s French critics to describe “a new mood of pessimism, cynicism and darkness” creeping into American cinema. Think acidic detectives, rain-slicked pavements, faces disappearing into shadow (thanks to all the depressed German lighting engineers who had just emigrated to Hollywood) and a slug of postwar cynicism. Everybody knows the phrase but how many of us could actually name the films? If you need me, I’ll be watching Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Gun Crazy and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye in the dark.
Blanca Schofield, assistant arts editor
Taylor Swift performing during her Eras Tour in 2023
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Extricate myself from the Taylor Swift cult
I was never one for obsessive fandom: I managed to avoid the Directioner craze among my peers, listening instead to whatever my older brother would put in front of me, from Run DMC to Jeff Buckley. I liked some of Taylor Swift’s songs but wasn’t obsessed. Then I had my first big heartbreak right before the pandemic and something happened — I couldn’t get enough of Reputation or Red and the addiction took off. It’s been five years and she’s been my most listened to artist in every Spotify Wrapped since. I’m in Swiftie group chats and end up defending her even when I know she’s in the wrong, finding it viscerally painful when she mis-steps as with this year’s album. It’s time to detox … at least until she releases more music. Knowing her, that could be next week.
Laura Hackett, deputy literary editor 
Celia Imrie participating in The Celebrity Traitors 2025
BBC/LISTEN ENTERTAIN
Watch more terrestrial TV
I began watching The Celebrity Traitors almost by mistake, after avoiding it for weeks. I was intrigued and amused but it wasn’t until I began watching the series live — making sure the washing up was done and the kettle boiled before switching to BBC1 — that I was really hooked. In retrospect it wasn’t just Celia Imrie’s farts that kept me glued to the screen but the joy of terrestrial TV: putting the show in my mental diary, watching it along with the nation (and discussing it the next morning) rather than bingeing it over a single weekend. As streamers dominate our viewing lives I’m committing to watching at least a few 2026 shows as they come, starting with The Night Manager, of course. Bring back weekly episodes! Bring back restraint! Make television mindful again!
Sathnam Sanghera, columnist 
The Irish writer Colm Tóibín
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Prioritise fiction
I’ve spent the past five years writing history, which has involved reading countless dense tomes in the name of research. It has been intellectually stimulating but the discipline doesn’t, let’s face it, attract the most interesting or creative writing. So my ambition for 2026 is to read as many novels as possible, and some poetry too, to become reacquainted with the linguistic experimentation that got me into writing in the first place. I’m particularly looking forward to The News from Dublin, Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short stories. I’ve given myself a head start by being a judge of this year’s Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, which so far has involved reading about 35 novels. Bring it on!
Richard Morrison, chief culture writer 
Thomas Hardy, c 1890, who published eight volumes of poems from 1898 to 1928
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Finish reading Hardy’s poetry
Back in the summer, in an eccentric moment, I worked out that there were about 900 days to go until the centenary of Thomas Hardy’s death (January 11, 2028, if you want to make a note). And as he wrote about 900 poems I could get through them all if I read one a day. So I have been. Thus far, however, I realise I’ve been selecting the short ironic ones and skipping the pages where he wrestles with the intractable purposes of malevolent fate in dense Victorian syntax that rarely reveals its meaning on first reading. With barely two years left I need to plunge more boldly into the profound depths of his imagination. It’s worth it. Hardy’s poetry can be bleak and cynical, no question. But it’s amazing how much better it makes you feel about your own life.
Ceci Browning, assistant literary editor 
Swan Lake at the London Coliseum
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Bring my mum to the ballet
I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw a ballet on stage. When I was about eight, Swan Lake was on at Oxford’s New Theatre and my mum booked tickets for the two of us. Not only did I get to stay up past my bedtime, there were real ballerinas with tulle skirts! And a score so beautiful I wanted to weep! Though my love of ballet has remained, I haven’t had my mum in the seat next to me for more than a decade. Next year I’m going to change that.
Neil Fisher, executive arts editor 
Margot Robbie playing Catherine Earnshaw in the latest Wuthering Heights, due to be released in February
ALAMY
Have a Brontë bonanza
It’s going to be a year of Brontë for me. Recently I picked up Charlotte B’s Villette — prompted by a Times recommendation from the author Kaliane Bradley, who described it as “superb” and “horny” — and while I can’t exactly say I’m racing through it, the narrator is a remarkable heroine: bitter, wry, self-hating, kind of like a corseted Fleabag. Next goal: wrap up Villette in time to read Emily’s Wuthering Heights before the “sexed-up” movie with Margot Robbie comes out (February 13), so I can criticise it smugly but authoritatively. And then, I suppose out of fairness, it’s time to find out whether Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is utterly brilliant or a weird story about rental agreements.
James Jackson, TV editor
London’s West End: not the cheapest place to start a new hobby
ALAMY
Give up music criticism from the Seventies and Eighties
If only for my sanity’s sake, I resolve to stop poring over endless archive reviews from 1980s music rags (NME, Smash Hits etc), bootleg clips of Pink Floyd in 1975, Jimmy Fallon chat show clips and other instant-hit cultural debris that have me glued to my phone while waiting for the pinger to go. Click on one and the algorithms never stop — and nor will I from zombie-scrolling to the next 1982 appraisal of Japan’s latest album. I’m an addict and need cultural rehab. This will take the form of getting out to the theatre again: to the National, to dramas that challenge and provoke thought. But given this would be in London’s West End, will my bank balance allow it?
Robert Crampton, columnist
Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility (1995)
ALAMY
Read all of Austen
I’m going to revisit Jane Austen, all six novels in order of publication. In fact I’ve already started, scorching through Sense and Sensibility on the commute to work, not quite the only person on the bus reading an actual book but certainly the only one reading words first published more than 200 years ago. Apart from the guy who recites passages from the Bible out loud. After I’m done with Persuasion, I’ll one-up Fraser Nelson by also getting back into Dostoevsky. But in the original Russian, obviously.
Clive Davis, chief theatre critic
Paula Beer playing Stella in Stella: Ein Leben (2021)
CHRISTIAN SCHULZ
Watch more foreign cinema
I want to try to watch a lot more films from beyond the US next year. Now that Americans are turning their back on the rest of us, the time has come to look to other cultures and learn more about them. Part of the problem is finding a good guide. I wish there was a TV programme that could point me in the right direction. Maybe readers know of one. Or maybe BBC2 can resurrect the World Cinema slot from many moons ago. Two I have enjoyed recently are a Moroccan film called Le bleu du caftan and one from Germany, Stella: Ein Leben. Also, in my dreams I’d love to play blues piano the way Randy Newman does in his solo concerts. I need to find a good teacher.
Ben Dowell, deputy TV editor 
Charli XCX performing in 2025
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Listen to the music my teenage daughters love
I live in a gynocracy, an all-female household (even our cats are girls), and have fairly typical middle-aged musical tastes (I still love the Smiths — sorry, guys). So it’s time I listened to some of the stuff enjoyed by my daughters, aged 14 and 17. I’ll do it in secret, of course — I’d get mocked even more mercilessly than I do already if they caught me getting down to some Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, Beabadoobee or the rapper JT, who is probably at the edgier end of their musical tastes. Music is the rhythm to their lives and I’d like to know what it feels like to inhabit their slipstream. Plus I pay for their Spotify accounts. And I can always invoke JT at a moment of domestic tension. “Why y’all hoes home nagging? (Purr, shut up!)” I might say. That’ll make me laugh anyway.
Susannah Butter, executive culture editor
Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager
BBC
Stop double-screening
I wish I could tell you about Jay Kelly. I was looking forward to watching George Clooney’s new film on Netflix. But the minute it began I settled down into old habits, merrily losing myself in my phone while the movie washed over me. I caught up on WhatsApps and went deep into Instagram to my partner’s horror, meaning we very much did not watch the film together. Next year, if only for the sake of my relationship, I will try to concentrate when we watch TV. The Night Manager will reward my full concentration. Surely I can keep off my phone for an hour?
Jonathan Dean, executive interviews editor 
2026 will be the year of trying to save cinema
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Make a monthly cinema trip with the kids
Ambitious, perhaps, but I am going to save cinema. I treat it as seriously as Extinction Rebellion takes the demise of the planet — if Netflix buys Warner Bros, the emphasis on the big screen will be in terminal decline. If the Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, had made Casablanca, he would have pushed subscribers to Love Is Blind instead. So the fightback will begin with me, because a cinema is important — in a world where teenagers spend too much time on social media, it is a hub to socialise, to snog. It is a pulse of a community too so in 2026 I will take my kids every month. Heck, I will even take their friends — to instil in them the joy and thrills of communal viewings, before everyone decides it is OK to watch Apocalypse Now on their phones.
Andrew Billen, features writer 
Sally Hawkins and Alexis Zegerman in Happy-Go-Lucky, directed by Mike Leigh (2008)
ALAMY
Have a weekly Mike Leigh movie night
I resolve to watch one Mike Leigh film a week. Inspired by his masterpiece Hard Truths, which was released in February, in 2025 my wife and I watched all of his mordantly socially observant television work from the Seventies and Eighties. It was a bleak treat. That there are another dozen Leigh films to revisit is something to look forward to, although I doubt they will do much to relieve the January gloom.
Debra Craine, chief dance critic
Chorus girls in the film 42nd Street
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Take tap dancing classes
Ever since I was a child and saw the exuberant tap dancers of 42nd Street — that glorious 1933 film — I have been bewitched by the art of tap dancing. From the debonair artistry of the incomparable Fred Astaire to the heavy-hitting beats of the Broadway star Savion Glover and the contemporary class of Michelle Dorrance, there is nothing more thrilling than the sight and sound of their hyperexcited dancing feet. My cultural resolution? To try it for myself.
Lesley Thomas, editor of Weekend
Chappell Roan, a contemporary pop princess
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Get my Spotify listening age above 21
If you’re a Gen X parent you probably fancy yourself as being a bit of a cool mum or dad and you’ll have purposefully influenced your children’s cultural tastes. It’s what we do. I saw it as part of my children’s education for them to have a working knowledge of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Echo and the Bunnymen. But my daughters influenced me too. The most played album in our car when they were kids was 2011’s Ultimate Pop Princesses (featuring Katy Perry, Britney, Cheryl Cole, Rihanna). When I was a goth-adjacent indie teenager I’d have sooner put hot pokers in my ears than listen to this kind of music. But when you’re listening with your sprogs, you submit to the joy of it all. So here I am, 15 years later, knowing all the words to the songs of pop queens such as Charli XCX, Lily Allen and Chappell Roan, and with a music “reading age” of 21, or so my Spotify Wrapped informs me. Meanwhile, my children have grown up in all senses. My daughter, 21, now has a Spotify age of 70 because she listens to “folk and cool stuff”, as she describes it. Maybe it’s time for me to grow up again too. LOL, not really.
Melissa Denes, associate arts editor
Join a local orchestra
My violin teacher gave up on me when I was 15 because I never practised but I’ve carried my case from home to home ever since in the hope that one day I’ll recommit. I’ve inherited a second violin, my grandfather’s, a Proustian rush of pine and resin, and also seen two daughters take lessons but then stop. Next year I’ll dust one of my violins down and join a local orchestra — nothing fancy, rehearsals of everything from Bach to Scott Joplin in a nearby school. “Almost all abilities” are welcome, so it’s time to put my études to the test. You can look for something near you at amateurorchestras.org.uk.
Alice Jones, features writer
The comedian James Acaster
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Take a risk on new comedy
Until a few years ago — when a new job and small children took over — I spent most of August, every August, at the Edinburgh Fringe watching up-and-coming comedians. Sometimes eight shows a day as a judge for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Some of it was bad — really awful, stick-pins-in-your-eyes stuff. Weirdly, I miss it. I miss the feeling of not having a clue what will happen when the lights go down and the mic switches on. I’ve grown too used to my own tastes, only going to see safe bets (yes, of course I’ve already booked my 2026 tickets to James Acaster, John Kearns, Kate Berlant and Sam Campbell). So next year I’m taking a chance on new stand-ups and going back to the clubs and the mixed bills, ready to cringe — and discover some new favourites too.